George Herms

About George Herms

George Herbert Herms was an American artist best known for the assemblages he created out of discarded, often rusty, dirty or broken every-day objects, and juxtaposing those objects so as to infuse them with poetry, humor, and meaning. He was also known for his works on paper, including works with ink, collage, drawing, paint, and poetry.

George Herbert Herms was an American artist best known for the assemblages he created out of discarded, often rusty, dirty or broken every-day objects, and juxtaposing those objects so as to infuse them with poetry, humor, and meaning. He was also known for his works on paper, including works with ink, collage, drawing, paint, and poetry. The prolific Herms also created theater pieces, about which he said, "I treat it as a Joseph Cornell box big enough that you can walk around in. It's just a continuation of my sculpture, one year at a time." Prominent curator Walter Hopps, who met Herms in 1956, "placed Herms on a dazzling continuum of assemblage artists that includes Pablo Picasso, Kurt Schwitters, Marcel Duchamp, and Joseph Cornell, as well as California luminaries Wallace Berman and Edward Kienholz", according to the Santa Monica Museum of Art; the Museum identified Herms as a member of the West Coast Beat Generation, and said that he credited Wallace Berman with "teaching him that any object, even a mundane cast-off, could be of great interest if contextualized properly". "That’s my whole thing", Herms said. "I turn shit into gold. I just really want to see something I've never seen before." Herms lived and worked in Irvine, California.

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